lifepoast

[lifepoast]

journal snippet from 📍 malaysia's june air

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The Moonbeam

i started drifting to sleep facing the lit candle on my nightstand. its light licked my eyelids—rolling, undulating, flickering against my skin, like someone knocking on the door, trying to get inside. i turned to face the window. there was a moonbeam so clean and bright i could almost hear it ringing, piercing through cloud on its way to me, then soundwaves bending in on themselves in the curve of the halo. or maybe it was the air itself that rung. the moonbeam, then, outpost of silence, hushed all murmur in opaque columns of air, a whole sky swallowed into its stillness. arcs of light so thin and supple like catwhisker, like harpstring you could pluck to play quiet.

[lifepoast]

hall of the bulls in lascaux. it is crazy business seeing cave art in scale with human beings. sometimes you see photos of them with no size reference and they kind of look like, or you assume that it would be, something about the size of what you would draw on a piece of A4, maybe A3 paper. a totally baseless assumption but kind of an affectionate one - i can't help subconsciously inviting the artists into my own world of logic, yes because i do not know any better, but also because there is something suggested both by what i do know, and by the art itself, which is so masterful and thus so human, that no matter the millennia seperating us, we are the same - to borrow a line from a book review i wrote a few years ago, the centuries are not nearly as far apart as they seem. as far as i'm concerned that is really the point of all this, all my interest in microhistory and autobiography and diary literature and cave art and whatever - that is the universal 'discovery' every little piece leads back to

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intro to the journal article Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography ... beautiful. Spadework for a Palace by László Krasznahorkai reads as one-shot prose about this apparently scholarly concern, but really there is little substantive distinction between the two, despite one being a peer-reviewed article and the other absurdist fiction. the human tendency to fall in love with the object of what is supposed to be strictly scholalry curiosity - you cannot write even distantly about (let alone partake in) this without falling into prose, academic journal culture bedamned

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'ad nauseam': to a disgusting or ridiculous degree, to the point of nausea

eating disorder mention below: this is an old entry that i typed in a very quick flurry at the very beginning of the year and somewhat fittingly i never managed to finish it in a way that 'satisfied' me. i thought it would be better to post it as-is rather than wait until some faraway version of myself decided to finish it off for me

“The best thing would be to write down everything that happens from day to day. To keep a diary in order to understand. To neglect no nuances or little details, even if they seem unimportant, and above all to classify them. I must say how I see this table, the street, people, my packet of tobacco, since these are the things which have changed. I must fix the exact extent and nature of this change.”

here is the opening passage of jean-paul sartre’s nausea that has had me thinking about (my neglect of) my journal lately. it puts the work of journaling next to the work of archiving history and thus under the same moral imperative. to do the work no matter what, no matter how uncomfortable it is to sit before the object—to stop wading through my life and letting it all pass through and fall behind me, to instead syphon out what begs holding onto, and interrogate why it begs—

“...[but] I mustn’t put strangeness where there’s nothing. I think that is the danger of keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything, you are on the look-out, and you continually stretch the truth.”

that is the follow-up sentence that made me think of my past journal entries and their stretches of the truth. i thought about this and realised he had failed to warn against the inverse, and i wonder if the inverse doesn’t have the potential to be even more insidious: i mustn’t leave nothing where there is strangeness. i mustn’t stretch the truth by omission. but i do. when i was asked for reflections on my 2023, what would choke itself in my throat was all i had to say about recovery from my eating disorder, which i had committed to that year. but in a few years i might never have remembered that, because i’ve completely avoided it in my journal, too. for six years my disordered behaviour had been snowballing toward its most painful and dangerous period from mid 2021 to early 2023, and never in all that time had i ever been willing or able to speak to myself about it.

confronting it recently has been my biggest breakthrough yet in “knowing myself,” maybe a cliche turn of phrase, but it’s fitting, i think of an introduction between two people—confronting it has made me suddenly aware, for the first time ever, of a ‘self’ inside of me to be introduced to in the first place. i happened upon the self like a creature in hiding. i think of bergentrückung. it had been dormant for who knows how long—so long that nobody was keeping track, or knew that there was some dormancy or absence to be kept track of. it was found with miraculously enough grip and determination to stick its fingers into reality and to manipulate it in ways previously thought impossible—to change a body as it appeared physically, to change the fundamental function of food, to increase what i thought was a fixed threshold of suffering in order to make room for its goals—goals and plans it had forged in secret, according to its own calculus of logic that the rest of reality was suddenly, easily willing to bend to.

i felt like the suffering had come into its own personality, characteristics, idiosyncracies, almost a tangible entity, which is why i'm speaking about it this way, and whatever its substance it could never, ever have been produced by anyone that wasn't 100% myself—because it was myself, it is purely me. it was self-imposed, constant in waking and in sleep, dual as both a punishment and a reward. i found that delicious—i didn't have to choose one. it was two-pronged: there was the suffering itself, and then there was the suffering of the feeling (but not the fact) that it could have stopped right away, at any moment, had i just lifted a finger and made a change.

that the suffering was as physical as it was psychological, that the changes it wrought were visible not only to myself, but to others, such that i could know that the change was actually REAL!—it all buckled and gave way to the new suffering of this new knowledge that i could touch reality and change it in a logical input-output relationship.

now there is no excuse for the inertia, inaction, ineffectiveness everywhere else in my life. 

so this is what everything has been working toward—years worth of scalding water rolling imperceptibly to a boil for me to find out, simply, that there was no reason for me to have all this time been behaving as a side character in my own life. part of the Greek chorus maybe, narrating the events that unfold around me with the detached bemusement of somebody on the outermost edge of the narrative, privileged with unconsciousness.

i learn all this only in retrospect after i begin 'recovery,' a tenuous word that seems to have as many different meanings as there are people committed to it. to me, i guess it is wresting control of the disordered self's cunning and determination to shape the reality around it, and aiming it at my life—the narrative—away from such an inconsequential thing as the flesh with which it's performed.

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⋆｡ﾟ☁︎｡⋆ nichijou ☾ ﾟ｡⋆₊ ⊹

i finished nichijou today. it was the perfect watch for my life right now. i'm very busy, lonely and am not enjoying everyday things. i'm in the process of moving out of an apartment i have loved so much for 2 years, and i'm doing it alone because my roommate is out of town until well after our move-in date.

i'm very sensitive to the idea of serendipity and things coming to my life for a reason, even (or especially) little things like an anime from 2011. what are the chances a random piece of media falls into my lap and resonates deeply at the exact moment—and in the exact way—that i needed it to?! in truth the actual miracle is that no matter what i watch or read, my desire to connect with something outside of myself is so strong that it's like i can do it to anything in my path. and in further truth it's not actually a miracle at all, because this is to say nothing of all the other pieces i watch and read in the interim and fail to finish because they don't resonate. (i have tried to pick up many books since my last and have put them all back down—sir gawain and the green knight, crime and punishment, perfect spy...). of course it's more likely i will have resonated with something that i liked enough to bother seeing it through to the end in the first place. i know that, and yet it all feels so miraculous anyway. that must be the thesis of nichijou rubbing off on me—that "our ordinary life that passes us day by day may actually be a series of wonderful miracles." ୧ ‧₊˚ 🎐 ⋅

what i love the most about this—about nichijou—is its suggestion that satire and comedy can be compassionate. sometimes i think this doesn't occur to people at all. in the toolbox of things that can make a great satire, compassion is overlooked in lieu of tools that can be more construed as weapons: bite, caricature, sarcasm. many would argue satirical intentions are noble. the work of satire is done so that its author may ask something good of its audience: to be more discerning, to put certain illogical behaviours away, to recognise things for what they 'are' with fresh eyes. so is nichijou even satire? i think so. i at least think it uses the ethnographic methodology of satire (highlighting and exaggerating mundane blind spots), only to ask its audience of something different, for once: not ridicule nor criticism, but gratitude and tenderness.

if i imagine vividly enough, stay lucid and self-aware enough, and stay optimistic enough to forbid disaster from ending my narrative, anything that happens in my day-to-day could be reinterpreted into oblivion until it becomes a ridiculous, overblown, dramatically and situationally ironic nichijou skit. and like in nichijou, i could fashion any little thing into a miracle. but to do this faithfully to the series' mechanics, i would have to let go of self-consciousness and control. nichijou wouldn't be nearly as fun to watch if its characters reacted by letting the insane, illogical world they inhabit beat them into submission—if they resisted the narrative's push to treat every little thing in life with equal weight. through everything they maintain their sincerity, and tend to their friendships, and they hold fast to their ridiculous plans and ideas, and everyone and everything around them is all the better for it—not least of all the show's humour.

but i guess nichijou made me emotional today because it made me reflect on my days in high school. it shocked me to realise that what few meaningful and lasting memories i have of it are entirely confined within the friendship i had with my two best friends, no one else. even though they probably know that, i wonder what they would feel if i said it to them. how else to phrase it? you were my life. you are my frame of reference when i watch bittersweet tv shows about being a high schooler. when the tv shows go for the low-hanging fruit, when they reach for my nostalgia and ask, "don't you miss this?" i think of you—which is another way of saying, i say "yes." i haven't talked to either of them in a very long time now.

the three of us were so in tune, so similar, it felt like our personal faults were contagious. we felt like a three-way mirror. and i think in front of a mirror, we are all are afraid to be sincere, and to let go of self-consciousness, and control. so when we were in high school together, we let the chaos around us make us obsessed with those things, and that was a logical response, because we simply didn’t know how much better we could have made things for ourselves. how could we have?! we were so preoccupied with avoiding being “cringe,” otaku shit like nichijou and the lessons they wrought were off-limits!!

━━━━━━━ ˖°˖ ☾☆☽ ˖°˖ ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

[lifepoast]

test: this is my blog!

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at the time of writing i'm 22 years old, halfway through my degree, and i have been sitting on the idea of committing to a personal blog for many years.. i think my recent friendship with winnie, which takes place in the long kaomoji-filled emails we send each other, has helped push me to make something of it finally...